Systems for controlling environmental conditions, for example in buildings, are becoming increasingly sophisticated. A control system may at once control heating and cooling, monitor air quality, detect hazardous conditions such as fire, carbon monoxide release, intrusion, and the like. Such control systems generally include at least one environment controller, which receives measured environmental values, generally from external sensors, and in turn determines set-points or command parameters to be sent to controlled appliances.
Communications between an environment controller and the devices under its control (sensors, controlled appliances) are currently based on wires. The wires are deployed in the building where the environment control system is operating, for instance in the walls, ceilings, and floors of multiple rooms in the building. Thus, deploying a new environment control system in a building implies deploying the wires used by the system for the communications between its components. Alternatively, upgrading an existing environment control system in a building (by the addition of new sensors, controlled appliances, or environment controllers) may imply upgrading the existing communication infrastructure used by the existing system, and thus deploying new wires. Deploying wires in a building is usually disrupting for the daily operations in the building and costly.
Therefore, there is a need for facilitating the deployment of a communication infrastructure between components of an environment control system, by using Wi-Fi communication technologies instead of wires. Further, there is a need to take into account legacy environment control systems, where some of the components may not be upgradable from wires to Wi-Fi communication technologies.